their failures. On our part we have been too
much accustomed to take in the gross with little or no examination,
whatever they have been pleased to transmit: and there is no method of
discovering the truth but by shewing wherein they failed, and pointing out
the mode of error, the line of deviation. By unravelling the clue, we may
be at last led to see things in their original state, and to reduce their
mythology to order. That my censures are not groundless, nor carried to an
undue degree of severity, may be proved from the like accusations from some
of their best writers; who accuse them both of ignorance and forgery.
[534]Hecataeus, of Miletus, acknowledges, _that the traditions of the Greeks
were as ridiculous as they were numerous_: [535]and Philo confesses _that
he could obtain little intelligence from that quarter: that the Grecians
had brought a mist upon learning, so that it was impossible to discover the
truth: he therefore applied to people of other countries for information,
from whom only it could be obtained_. Plato[536] owned _that the most
genuine helps to philosophy were borrowed from those who by the Greeks were
styled barbarous_: and [537]Jamblichus gives the true reason for the
preference. _The Helladians_, says this writer, _are ever wavering and
unsettled in their principles, and are carried about by the least impulse.
They want steadiness; and if they obtain any salutary knowledge, they
cannot retain it; nay, they quit it with a kind of eagerness; and, whatever
they do admit, they new mould and fashion, according to some novel and
uncertain mode of reasoning. But people of other countries are more
determinate in their principles, and abide more uniformly by the very terms
which they have traditionally received._ They are represented in the same
light by Theophilus: [538]he says, _that they wrote merely for empty
praise, and were so blinded with vanity, that they neither discovered the
truth theirselves, nor encouraged others to pursue it_. Hence Tatianus
says, with great truth, [539]_that the writers of other countries were
strangers to that vanity with which the Grecians were infected: that they
were more simple and uniform, and did not encourage themselves in an
affected variety of notions_.

In respect to foreign history, and geographical knowledge, the Greeks, in
general, were very ignorant: and the writers, who, in the time of the Roman
Empire, began to make more accurate inquiries, met with in